Binge drinking

Many college students see alcohol as a way to loosen up and to party, but what many of them don t know are the dangers of binge drinking. Binge drinking has a gender-specific definition: five drinks in a row for men and four drinks in a row for women. Binge drinking has many negative consequences that can be both physical and emotional.

Alcohol is a depressant, meaning that it slows down the nervous system. When one drinks, the alcohol goes into the stomach and small intestine. The alcohol is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, and goes to every organ including the brain. In the brain, alcohol affects one s ability to process information. It takes a drunken person longer to react to situations, and a drunk has trouble exercising good judgment. A few drinks can impair a person s coordination and that is where lots of physical consequences occur.

Because alcohol affects a person s coordination, drunks tend to loose their balance and run into things more often that normal. Physical damages can be as small as little bruises and cut, but can be as serious as broken bones or even death. Death from binge drinking is called alcohol poisoning. This happens because of such a high level of alcohol in a persons body can simply shut off the nervous system. This causes breathing to stop and the victim to die.

Blackouts can be a very scary emotional and physical consequence. Because alcohol in the brain causes information to be processed very crudely, the information that a drunk obtains from that night might not get stored. This means that sometimes one might wake up the next morning and not remember what they did the night before. Blackouts put a person at a greater risk of death, unsafe sex, unplanned pregnancy, violence, rape, and legal troubles. The chance of having a blackout is greatly increased with the amount of alcohol one drinks in a night, in other words from binge drinking.